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The Peak Project, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China, Exterior perspective

Zaha Hadid (British, born Iraq 1950)

1991. Synthetic polymer on paper mounted on canvas, 51 x 72" (129.5 x 182.9 cm). David Rockefeller, Jr. Fund. © 2010 Zaha Hadid

108.1992

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York:The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 322

This project by Hadid, whose work has been called "deconstructivist," was the winning design in a competition for a private club to be located in the hills of Kowloon, overlooking Hong Kong. Hadid proposed a transformation of the site itself by excavating the hills and using the excavated rock to build artificial cliffs. Into this new topography, she interjected cantilevered beams, shardlike fragments, and other elements that seemed to splinter the structure into its myriad constituent parts, as if it had been subjected to some powerful de–stabilizing force.

Seemingly defiant of gravity, the forms of Hadid's project hover and float, animated by the same visionary power that marked the ground–breaking Constructivist structures that Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Moisei Ginzburg imagined would arise in a new, postrevolutionary Soviet society. That seeming instability, which can also be found in the works of a number of other architects active in the 1980s, has been related to the literary movement of deconstruction, whose principal interpreter, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, has become a familiar figure within contemporary debates on architectural theory.

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